jamesbmarshall

Do you HAVE to use Cached mode with Office 365 and Outlook? - Email and calendar - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community

Since I know this is a feature close to the hearts of many of you, I thought I'd share this: Synchronising passwords with Office 365 - UK Education Cloud Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the secret to a successful deployment is to keep it as simple as you can, as long as you can. It's very quick to get signed up, and you can be piloting with a few users in just a few hours. The advanced options like directory synchronisation and federated authentication can be added later if needed but trying to implement them up front can introduce unnecessary delays and complexity if all you want to do is get your hands on the service! Microsoft partners provide great solutions to help you get on-board but it really depends on your requirements. For example, if you just want a basic email solution you can probably do this yourself in no time. If, on the other hand, you want a fully customised SharePoint Online solution then it might be worth engaging a partner to help. Keep it simple, stupid!

I know a few people have been asking / waiting for this, so here it is! SkyDrive Pro client for Windows now available - UK Education Cloud Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Have a great bank holiday!

Other types of administrator cannot reset the password details of global administrators (for very valid security reasons). Therefore, unless you have many global admins (not a great idea) to rely on to reset each others passwords in the event of someone forgetting, you're left in the situation where you need to recover your own account which you can do by providing some alternate contact details. Microsoft Support is there to help you fix problems, sure, and it's there 24 hours a day. The support team isn't there to reset passwords though - and surely it's far less churn for your administrators to be able to recover their accounts instantly themselves, rather than having to phone Microsoft.

Everything you need to know, and more is here: Live@edu Upgrade to Office 365 for education (English) - Upgrade to Office 365 - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community ILM & PCNS will stop working, so you'll at least need to move to DirSync. If you want password sync you'll have to move to ADFS as PCNS is not currently supported. Ideally, in the ADFS scenario you'd have an ADFS box internally, and a proxy in your DMZ (and of course, these would be load balanced and configured for HA). You need a 3rd party signed cert to establish the federation with Microsoft, but a self-signed cert will do for setting up your proxy. My advice, to everyone, is to try and keep deployments as simple as possible. There may be an announcement about PCNS-style functionality coming which would remove the need to invest so heavily in ADFS, but there are no dates or confirmations at this time. I would upgrade, deploy DirSync, and see how you go (existing passwords will come across with the upgrade). If PCNS does land, great. If not, you can deploy ADFS at any point.

FOPE is moving to EOP with the service upgrade to the new Office 365. Bear in mind that individual users do not have access to a quarantine. Every user is automatically protected by either FOPE or EOP - you don't need to create the users anywhere.

Why is that stupid? If a user forgets their password, they come to you... but if you lose access to your account, and you're the admin, who do you go to?

There are Microsoft partners who have built solutions for automating this, but there's nothing that's part of the service. You could write a PowerShell script that will largely automate it, but not fully.

While I'm in no position to guarantee anything, what I can say is that Microsoft has been offering this (well, Live@edu and now this) since about 2005 in various forms for free and I don't see that changing any time soon.

The only way to provide a custom sign-in page is to deploy ADFS or Shibboleth. Although, why would you want to stop your users from seeing that beautiful photo of the PCH?

If you're trying this as soon as you've enabled the ABPs you might want to go and have a coffee and come back since it can take a while for the policy to update. I wrote a blog post that might also help (principle is the same, even if the subject matter is different): Alumni Address Book Policy in Office 365 Education - UK Education Cloud Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Did you by any chance rename your administrator account from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]"? It sounds like you've turned on AD FS federation for your domain, and since there's a problem with it you now can't log in as your administrator because it's in a federated domain (and since ADFS has the problem, you can't authenticate... and round and round we go). The only way to resolve this is to either fix the problem with AD FS (if you know what it is, and it doesn't rely on access to the tenant), or as @AngryTechnician says, phone support. This is a fairly common occurrence where people don't realise just how important it is to keep your admin account separate from everything else! Support are well versed in how to fix the issue, give them a call and they'll help you get this sorted.

ADFS does not sync passwords, but acts as a method to divert authentication to your local AD for access to Office 365. You're correct - if AD FS is unavailable then nobody can access Office 365. There may well be a password sync solution coming soon. Maybe.

You don't need to do any kind of integration from day one. DirSync and ADFS can both be configured much later (if at all). I strongly recommend that most people try the least complex method of deployment and ramp up, rather than go for everything at once.

If any of your users do not meet the password complexity rules for Office 365 then they'll be guided through the self-service password reset process in order to set themselves a stronger password. If users have cached their credentials for logging into Live@edu via the browser then they'll have to clear their cookies. Also, make sure they're using the new URL as a matter of best practice! The consumer SkyDrive client will not work with SharePoint Online. Obviously, your existing users will keep their Microsoft Accounts and so will be able to continue using their SkyDrives (and desktop client), but new users will have to use SkyDrive Pro. In theory, nothing. Although, they may need to re-enter their credentials.

Provided you've looked through the wiki, nothing scary: Live@edu Upgrade to Office 365 for education (English) - Upgrade to Office 365 - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community If you're using ILM & PCNS you'll need to make plans to upgrade to DirSync. If you're using the SSO toolkit you'll need to make sure you're running the 4.5 update, and prepare longer term for ADFS / Shibboleth. After the upgrade has completed you can also tell your users to login at http://mail.office365.com rather than http://outlook.com/yourdomain.com

I've noticed that my humble little blog is missing something ... YOU! I'm looking for one or two guest contributions from the community about Office 365 Education. I'm not asking for Shakespeare but a reasonable sized blog post about: Something cool you've done with Office 365 Education Or, something about the impact / benefits it's had to your institution Or, surprise me! It's not a competition or anything - I'm just keen to share best practice and the stories of great people for others to read about. If you're interested in writing something drop me a PM, tell me about yourself and what you'd like to contribute.

If you've got fewer than 1000 mailboxes you could do a cutover migration. Migrate All Mailboxes to the Cloud with a Cutover Exchange Migration (Assuming you're moving from Exchange!) Or staged... http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/ff959224.aspx

I'd be interested to see some statistics (if you have any) that show the difference in network traffic (internal, and inbound/outbound) between a local Exchange server vs. Exchange Online. Other things you could try might be using a different version of IE (or a different browser) to see if there's any difference in performance, and also try bypassing any caching or proxy servers. Are your users reporting problems only with their email, or the network in general - can you pull out some stats on concurrency for how many users are connected out to Office 365 at any one time?

With respect to the first document - where did you get it? That is not our current guidance as far as I know, although as you've said it is targeted at partners rather than end customers. The SSO Toolkit for Live@edu users is not for new deployments of Office 365, and will have an end-of-life. I feel I have to be really clear about this, to avoid any unfair expectations: password sync is not currently supported for Office 365. The best, and supported, method is to use single sign-on through AD FS or Shibboleth. Any roadmap for password sync is just that, and you should avoid trying to hack a solution as this will not be supported. I know that's blunt, but I don't want to mislead anyone. "What's coming", "what's possible" and "what's supported", are different things, and I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I recommended something that wasn't supported.

Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. How are your users accessing Office 365? The hit on bandwidth will depend on a number of factors: - Are users using OWA or Outlook (also, which version?)? - Are you using single sign-on? - If users are using Outlook, are they trying to sync down huge mailboxes? - How did you do your migration? If you did a hybrid/remote mailbox move then your OST file should still be valid for the mailbox in the new location. If not, users will need to pull down their mailbox again. - Are your users using any of the other workloads? and of course... - Has anything else on your network changed? I'd only expect to see your Internet bandwidth affected - and even then, not hugely.

Sorry, I've been dying to use it for a long time. It is patronising, but hopefully in a playful way.

Let me Bing that for you!

If you're on the new Office 365, then it's been available since that blog post was published. It will not be coming to the pre-upgrade version. The documentation is here: Address Book Policies: Exchange 2013 Help